Pressure from car dealers and General Motors resulted in Governor Rick Snyder signing at the last minute a law that made it impossible to directly sell in Michigan electric cars manufactured by Tesla Motors, a company that's based in Palo Alto, California, and a company that's rapidly growing. Car dealers claim that the ban was made in the interest of the consumer. Tesla was not mentioned in the law.

For those who want to see how capitalism actually works, this story (the state, the corporations, the law, the ban) will give you the best picture. What it shows is that capitalism is not about free markets and all of the classical and neoclassical nonsense taught in economic courses; it's about this very close relationship between the state and the most powerful members of the business community. This is how capitalism got started in the 18th century, and is why socialism failed to bring it to an end in the 20th century.

You can't transform this particularly economic system without radically transforming its relationship with the state—the institution that makes, for one, corporations even possible (a General Motors cannot exist without limited liability--"where a person's financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a person's investment in a company or partnership.") The first mistake socialists made was to think capitalism is about markets. This mistake was not made by neoliberals, which is why they have been in power for the past 30 years.